Shipping protection, gift wrap, donations and warranties. A ticked paid add-on looks like free margin. Count what comes back.
The most common preselected choice in DTC checkout is a small paid extra: package protection, a donation, priority handling. It’s often installed by an app that may be paid on take rate, and ticked because a ticked box sells more. The question is what the extra takers cost you afterward.
In the EU this was settled in 2011. The Consumer Rights Directive requires “express consent to any extra payment,” and a charge added through “default options which the consumer is required to reject” must be refunded Published. The UK has the same rule in its Consumer Contracts Regulations.
The UK regulator has now enforced it with its new direct powers. In June 2026 the Competition and Markets Authority ordered Marks Electrical, a UK appliance retailer, to refund nearly 40,000 customers about £600,000 for two pre-selected paid services at checkout, recycling an old appliance and unwrapping and recycling packaging, and fined it £720,000 Filed. The CMA’s Emma Cochrane put it plainly: “The law is absolutely clear that automatically opting customers into extra charges is never ok.”
The US has no single rule banning a ticked add-on. But the FTC’s 2022 report on dark patterns lists pre-checked boxes among the old tricks dark patterns have refined Published, and its 2025 Amazon settlement required a clear decline button that can’t say “No, I don’t want Free Shipping” Filed. Have counsel review what applies in the states you sell into.
Even where it’s allowed, it might not pay. People who take an add-on because it was ticked aren’t the people who choose it. Some email support. Some ask for a refund. A few dispute the whole order, which costs the fee, the order and a mark on your dispute ratio. Some decide you’re a brand that slips things into the cart. None of that appears in the app’s dashboard. The tool puts it next to the margin.
With the defaults, a store with 10,000 orders a month and a $3 add-on gets 4,500 extra takers from the tick and $8,100 of extra add-on margin. Six in a hundred of them complaining, plus three disputes in a thousand, costs back about $8,050. The tick earns about $54 a month, and it stops paying at a complaint rate just over 6% Derived. Unticked, the same add-on earns $4,500 a month from customers who wanted it, with none of the complaints.
The margin from a ticked box is visible in one dashboard. Its costs are scattered across four. That’s the only reason it looks good.
The complaint rate decides this, and most stores have never counted it. Search a month of tickets and refund notes for the add-on’s name and divide by default-only takers, not all orders. Better still, untick it for half your traffic for four weeks and compare add-on revenue, tickets and refunds.
An unticked add-on still sells when explained in one plain line near the total: “Package protection, $3: if it’s lost or damaged in transit, we’ll replace it.” Customers who tick it won’t complain.
This is one chapter of The Free Choice, which is free and readable in full on a single page with no form in front of it.